Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, and how can we begin to understand what precipitated those changes? Lastly, what are meaningful ways to convey that knowledge to students? An answer I’ve come up with is the American Studies Tagline – a timeline-based tag cloud that takes the essential American Studies texts in Lucy Maddox’s book and visualizes their contents.
The American Studies Tagline textually analyzes the articles in Maddox’s book and shows the most used words in a larger font and new terms in brighter colors. You can drag the slider to control the year – allowing you to clearly see what critics looked at, and how that has changed. I used open source software, also used by this incredible Presidential Speeches tagline which originally gave me this idea. The process was simple – I copied the contents of all these articles, dumped them into an XML file, and then used a cloud generator to visualize the text. This is something that historians and enthusiasts with limited knowledge of PHP and creating web pages can set up and use themselves.
Visualization tools tend to be confusing, especially tag clouds. Since the American Studies Tagline charts both the frequency of key words, as well as indicating how new terms are, I think its usefulness is clearer. In particular, the ability to use the slider – moving through articles in consecutive time periods allows visitors to travel through disciplinary history. A great example of how this could be used would be to look at the emergence of “ideology” within these texts, and then encourage students to analyze what texts use the term, when it came about, and engaging in dialogue about how that relates to shifts in thinking.
My plan is to include an improved version of this tagline in a future Crossroads Project exhibition. I’m interested in hearing from American Studies professors and students who use the tagline – particularly about what the tagline can tell you, ways they’ve used it, and how it fails and/or succeeds as a learning tool. A future version of this tagline will include a list of strategies for using this and similar history visualizations, and perhaps a greater library of visualized texts.